41–50 of 61 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You spend day and night on building a product, you make sure everything works right and its scaled for traffic. Once you have a beta product ready, you decide to blog about it, you meticulously work on generating some good content, fire up a large instance on AWS, set up a wordpress blog, and the blog is live. Now you decide to post about it on HN, fortunately some people like what you have written, you start getting…
So is there a simple solution?
I always find it funny that half the people/companies advocating these approaches can't even keep a simple WordPress blog up when faced with a bit of traffic. Surely there must be an algorithm for that?
You spend day and night on building a product, you make sure everything works right and its scaled for traffic. Once you have a beta product ready, you decide to blog about it, you meticulously work on generating some good content, fire up a large instance on AWS, set up a wordpress blog, and the blog is live. Now you decide to post about it on HN, fortunately some people like what you have written, you start getting…
I'll use myself as an example: I'm a self-taught developer who has built and managed high-profile, high-usage websites/web applications. I probably could not pass one of your algorithm-based FizzBuzz tests, but if I was hiring and you suggested that a site should scale simply because you threw it on a large AWS instance, I would not consider your candidacy further regardless of your ability to pass a FizzBuzz test.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> check cultural fit. I see lots of references to "culture" in hiring comments, so I'm not trying to call you specifically out, but what does it mean? It always bristles me, like if your criteria is "white men only need apply" well just outright say it, don't tiptoe around it. As a suggestion to anyone on HN who does hiring, if for example you're not going to hire my wife because of her ethnicity or because she's a w…
I read it as "people from Standford aged 19-26"
Its somewhat frustrating that "what defines a good developer" to a boss might be being a white male brogrammer from Stanford. But whats even worse is the uncertainty of not understanding what the criteria even is. Is it only whites need apply, or only men need apply, or both, or neither? That is what makes it even more aggravating. Its not 1950 anymore boys, its a multicultural world, so demanding a certain culture/demographic fit is going to result in epic fail if any competitor is smart enough to (gasp!) hire women or people of color or dare I suggest it, non Stanford grads.
Startups and people who hire should realize that they're turning off good applicants when they start talking about "culture" because people of color are going to assume you mean white people only, women are going to assume you mean hire men only, etc. As a business decision its just a bad move.
I am not agreeing on this. Unless you are hiring an expert, most of developers out there earning their lives by coding can not write a simple bubble sort when you give them a console. Not because they don't have the capacity, They will either not remember the algorithm at the moment or haven't had a such situation requires similar approach at their previous work. If you really want to know if he/she knows stuff, ask…
To be fair, eliminating a fair portion of candidates (assuming the test does a good job of identifying the ones you wouldn't hire) isn't a bad thing. Time is a valuable resource.
// Your code
if "Time is a valuable resource."
Don't waste employers' time
end
// Adds candidates' time to the case
// Decreases listOfCandidates() loading time.
if "Time is a valuable resource"
Publish a well-detailed job position
endEarlier quoted context omitted.
If the best you can do is to set a trivial programming problem, then indeed, that is deeply unimpressive. Happily, that is not what the article is suggesting, nor what anyone actually does. The article gives three steps: first, a trivial programming problem, second, a challenging programming problem (here delivered as homework), and thirdly, a face-to-face interview to check cultural fit. The purpose of the trivial p…
> check cultural fit. I see lots of references to "culture" in hiring comments, so I'm not trying to call you specifically out, but what does it mean? It always bristles me, like if your criteria is "white men only need apply" well just outright say it, don't tiptoe around it. As a suggestion to anyone on HN who does hiring, if for example you're not going to hire my wife because of her ethnicity or because she's a w…
In no case is the person wrong in what they want, but it might not fit in with the current culture, which can be bad for everyone involved.
That said - I agree that this can manifest itself as a never never land (the culture is drink till 4am on weekdays!), but I do still think that it is an important aspect of any organization, and properly applied can be beneficial.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And is this a buyer or a seller's market? If it's a buyer's market then you can give the interviewee as many tests as you like. If it's a seller's market... you'd better have something really good going for you!
That would seem premised on the idea that it is better to have someone barely capable in the position than to go without. In my own personal experience I'd rather be short handed than work with someone incompetent.
If there were 20 plumbers and only 10 plumber jobs, I could get away with jerking them around forcing them to do crossword puzzles before hiring them to fix my toilet. That doesn't mean the selection pressure would magically result in the guy most likely to fix my leaky toilet; much more likely it would result in the guy best at doing crossword puzzles. Unfortunately I now have a concrete deliverable of a leaky toilet to fix, and the best crossword puzzle solver in the market trying to fix it. That isn't going to end well. Especially when the best leaky toilet fixer in the world knows he can refuse the crossword puzzle test and get a job via his rep or connections so he never even applies. So its not just a random selection of applicants, but a random selection of an inferior population.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You spend day and night on building a product, you make sure everything works right and its scaled for traffic. Once you have a beta product ready, you decide to blog about it, you meticulously work on generating some good content, fire up a large instance on AWS, set up a wordpress blog, and the blog is live. Now you decide to post about it on HN, fortunately some people like what you have written, you start getting…
I empathize with you, but your experience highlights the flaws in the approach you're advocating. I'll use myself as an example: I'm a self-taught developer who has built and managed high-profile, high-usage websites/web applications. I probably could not pass one of your algorithm-based FizzBuzz tests, but if I was hiring and you suggested that a site should scale simply because you threw it on a large AWS instance,…
You want to focus on the product, fix bugs, look after feature request, produce high quality content. And then your blog crashes and things get derailed.
I understand the frustration of sifting through hundreds of "fake" resumes where candidates can't code a fiz-buzz, but from the other end it is a total waste of my time spending 20 minutes of my time solving these coding challenges every time I want to know more about a prospective position. If would be nice if the recruiter agencies (who are actually getting paid to do a job), would hire people qualified to understa…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I empathize with you, but your experience highlights the flaws in the approach you're advocating. I'll use myself as an example: I'm a self-taught developer who has built and managed high-profile, high-usage websites/web applications. I probably could not pass one of your algorithm-based FizzBuzz tests, but if I was hiring and you suggested that a site should scale simply because you threw it on a large AWS instance,…
I did not intend to say that the blog should work simply because we threw it on a large instance, we have been running our site on AWS and have successfully handled much larger load. We never needed to move beyond a larger server for the main site, of course with horizontal scaling. What I meant was, when you are swamped with so many things you don't want to spend too much time on things like maintaining your blog. Y…
That's precisely what you said:
"You thought a large server would be enough to handle a single wordpress blog..."
> when you are swamped with so many things you don't want to spend too much time on things like maintaining your blog.
A competent developer should be able to set up a load balanced WordPress blog (with Nginx/PHP-FPM, Varnish and a separate database server) in a day or less. There are a number of well-written tutorials on this.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> check cultural fit. I see lots of references to "culture" in hiring comments, so I'm not trying to call you specifically out, but what does it mean? It always bristles me, like if your criteria is "white men only need apply" well just outright say it, don't tiptoe around it. As a suggestion to anyone on HN who does hiring, if for example you're not going to hire my wife because of her ethnicity or because she's a w…
Imagine hiring a manager who expected their reports to be in at 9am sharp, when the current company culture is to work whatever hours people want. Or someone who very strongly preferred a more methodological approach to development to a "ship fast and break things" approach in a company that values the latter. Or someone who wanted five weeks of vacation in a bootstrapping company where everyone was working 60 hour w…
Culture is not issued at your previous employer along with the company policies handbook, id card, and a dress code.
Culture is what you are, not how your immediately previous employer temporarily defined you while at work. My culture is I'm a northern European descended male living in USA, for my whole life I've been whats now called a "maker" for decades before being a maker was cool, religiously unaligned with any particular deity and live and let live with everyone else's imaginary man in the sky (and why is it always a "man in the sky" anyway?), educated in the classical "great books of western civ" sense, and my tastes in entertainment are vaguely European in outlook for example sex is great fun but violence is sick (I'm not a big fan of hollywood gorefest movies). And being a mostly German descended guy I have a pretty tidy front lawn in front of my house, that stereotype is often true.
Culture is not "$current_employer tolerates flextime so I could never work in the future anywhere else that doesn't have flextime because all human beings are permanently inflexible, oh wait, actually I've never worked the same schedule at two difference consecutive jobs so I guess it doesn't matter anyway"
Everyone knows 60 hour weeks means reduced productivity compared to 40 hour weeks, so I can slack off if I have to, to fit in with the other burned out sleep deprived zombies, but rest assured I'm only going to work like a demon for 40 hours and then surf the net for 20 because you get there the fastest by going slow.